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Where the Sun still shines...

Thursday Nov 30, 2006

It's been making a scary buzzing noise for months, but yesterday the hard drive gave up the ghost. While doing some diagnostics in its death throes, I also noticed that I seem to be suffering from the logic board failure that causes half your memory to go AWOL. Not sure which of those was responsible for the buzzing noise (if either)-- will find out when I replace the disk in the next day or two, I guess.

Of course, Apple being Apple, they'll only admit that the logic board was faulty on a certain range of PB G4s, with serial numbers from W8503xxxxxx to W8518xxxxxx... and three guesses whose is a W8502. So no free repair for me.

I guess that leaves me three possibilities (four if you count "do nothing and hope it doesn't get any worse")... sell my 2x512Mb memory sticks and replace them with a 1xGb stick in the 'good' slot (and hope none of the more serious symptoms of the failure appear); purchase AppleCare now for €450, even though I'll only get a year out of it now rather than three, and have it repaired under that; or pay the somewhat ludicrous €690+ that my local Apple authorised repair shop quoted me. Hrmm.

Edit: D'oh, just realised you can only buy AppleCare within a year of purchase, of course. Just have to cross my fingers for a while then, I think :)

About

I am an Interaction Designer in the Systems Experience Design team, arriving at Oracle via Sun where I've worked since 2000. I currently work on sysadmin user experience projects for Solaris. Formerly I worked on open source Solaris desktop projects such as GNOME, NWAM and IPS.